A Stranger War
by Wyvvern
Summary: Commander Erin Shepard, hero of the Reaper War, finds herself in a city from the past. But this city's past is not the same as the one in her history books, and its struggles are larger than anything she could have expected. Faced with a far shorter cycle of destruction, Shepard must once again find a way to break it.
1. Chapter 1

Chapter 1

"Commander Erin Shepard, Spectre. Service Number SA-477-39-95." The armored woman in the center of the room stared resolutely at a pile of firearms on the table in the corner of the room, stubbornly refusing to make eye contact with the filthy man in front of her.

"C'mon sweetheart, don' be like that. Skiddy's gonna treat'chu right. You just gotta prove you're a cape and we'll be all good. Like fucking family. You know I saw that glowy-ass blue shit you did back in the alley. 'Course, if ya don' tell, we're gonna have a fuckin' problem, ya hear?" Skidmard leaned in and grabbed the redhead's chin, forcing her to look him in the face. He saw her grimace in disgust before she spoke again.

"Commander Erin Shepard, Spectre. Service Number SA-477-39-95."

"A'ight bitch. We'll do it your way." The grimy man turned away from his captive and readied a syringe. He had already shot her up with a number of different substances to try to make her talk, but other than a bit of blankness in her stare the myriad drugs in her system seemed to do nothing to her.

This last drug was special, though. He had ordered it from a chemical tinker out of state as a specialty item with the exotic effect of inducing loyalty in the person it was injected in. Once the drug took effect, the victim would become fanatically loyal to the first person they saw. The effect wasn't permanent, but it did last a number of hours. Skidmark planned to take full advantage of that time. He was about to have a girl who would do whatever he told her, and as a bonus was actually quite attractive. He saw no reason not to have a bit of fun.

Skidmark put on a cocksure expression and sauntered up to the woman. "Up 'till now I've been real fuckin' nice with you. I gave ya all the chances to tell me what I want, but you din' say nothin'. So now you're gonna be real nice with me, got it?" He shook the syringe in her face. "Once this hits ya you'll be beggin' to tell me everythin'. So I'll give you one last goddamn chance. What's. Your. Power?"

The woman stared him straight in the eyes, unblinking, and Skidmark stared back. Seconds ticked by, until finally the woman seemed to reach a conclusion and the ghost of a smirk flickered at the corners of her lips.

"Commander Erin Shepard, Spectre. Service Number SA-477-39-95."

"Bitch! Motherfucker! I'm gonna shoot you up with so much of this shit your children will beg to be my fucktoys! I'm gonna use you raw and fucking dump your naked bitch ass in the goddamn Bay! You hear me?! No one laughs at Skidmark!"

The man grabbed the woman by the throat and jabbed the needle into the side of her neck.

Or he tried to. As soon as the syringe started its way downwards the woman exploded in a corona of blue and purple light and Skidmark went flying backwards, cracking his head painfully against the cinderblock walls.

While her captor was still in a daze the woman applied the same shimmering energy to the cuffs holding her to the chair and they shattered with a shriek of protesting metal. She then turned her attention back to her captor. Skidmark was attempting to claw his way to his feet when suddenly he froze, a glowing blue aura holding him in place.

The woman was only slightly unsteady as she casually made her way over to the table and grabbed a helmet from it, then fitted it over her head and sealed it to the rest of her armor with a soft hiss and click. After locking the various futuristic weapons to magnetic strips on her armor she turned back to Skidmark, who was still trapped inside a glowing barrier.

"Look. I don't know who you are, or what you want. But you just tried to detain me and drug me, so we are not friends. And, as a friend once said, my enemies have a way of dying." She pulled her pistol from her hip and held it lined up with Skidmark's forehead. She spoke as her hand glowed blue and the stasis field around the man dissipated.

"It's been fun and all, but I'm nobody's bitch."

* * *

Erin Shepard walked out of the building to find a city that was far more intact than she expected. Which was saying something. This city was clean by no one's reckoning. The buildings were cracked and battered, the windows were nothing more than a few shards of glass still clinging desperately to their frames, and the road looked like something even her old Mako tank would have difficulty crossing.

All that was secondary to the fact that it looked _old._ Really old. It looked like something built at the end of the 20th Century. Instead of the sweeping lines of late 22nd Century construction, this city was all old cement and brick. She wondered how she hadn't noticed this before even through the haze of the half-a-dozen drugs Skidmark poured into her veins before she woke up. These were the times when she really appreciated her increasingly cybernetic body. Her upgraded liver and kidneys were the only things protecting her from an overdose, and they were the reason why she regained enough lucidity to fight.

Now that her head was clear and she had a grasp of her surroundings, she realized that she looked extremely out of place. In a city that looked to be all crumbling city blocks and homeless people, she stood there in top of the line N7 armor, a Paladin heavy pistol, a Tempest sub-machine gun, a Phaeston assault rifle, a Geth Plasma Shotgun, and a Black Widow sniper rifle. Such a heavily armed and armored individual would stand out anywhere, but in this city from the past she was a spectacle to be seen.

Deciding it would be better to be out of sight and at a vantage point, she put on her helmet and walked to the side of the sturdiest building she could see. It was a four story tall warehouse: plenty short enough for what she was about to do. Remembering the lessons she got from Samara before their suicide mission she flared her biotics around her and jumped.

Her reduced mass and superhuman strength sent her rocketing into the sky, far overshooting her target perch but giving her a panoramic view of the city around her. Activating a modified stasis field around herself, she locked into place in the sky.

Now she could see that her initial assumption was wrong. The entire city wasn't run down. She had just happened to wake up in the slums. A few miles away, across a bay, was a gleaming city-center of skyscrapers and lights. It was still nothing as impressive as the skyline of Vancouver, which she had had ample chance to study while incarcerated before the Reaper War, but it did look like the place where the authorities would be.

Or she would have thought that, if something truly unexpected hadn't been sitting right out in the middle of the bay. It looked like once, a very long time ago, it might have been an oil rig, but now it only shared that general shape. It had been transformed into a shining spire of white, and Shepard had no doubt that this was the center of government in the city.

The base out in the bay had missile pods attached all over its hull and a large domed kinetic barrier wrapping around it. These looked more familiar to Shepard, and she decided that that was the place to find answers. She briefly wondered why a city that looked so old sat next to a very modern government installation, but that wasn't a question she could answer right then.

Letting her Stasis field disperse she gently lowered herself to the rooftop. Pulling out her Black Widow she scanned the city through the scope, looking for a way out to the rig. She could see broken hulls of ships sitting dead in the bay, but nothing stood out until she saw a tiny ferry begin moving from the far side of the bay towards the rig. That ferry station was where she needed to go.

As much as she hated Infiltrator training, Shepard did have to admit that the knowledge came in handy. Trying to cross an entire city in armor from a different era was hard enough when you have a tactical cloak module and know how to stay unseen. Having to do it without all that would have been a nightmare. In the four hours she had spent sneaking across the city she had already had to cloak past groups of gang members patrolling the streets, and had even seen a group of what looked like homeless people in a brawl with a group of Asian gang members.

After that the groups of people on street corners had changed from homeless druggies to groups of Asian gangbangers all in red and green clothing. Shepard assumed those were the gang colors of the seemingly pan-asian gang that controlled this area.

This new gang was more organized than the last, and the groups that lingered on street corners had lookouts a block away in each direction, presumably to warn them if law enforcement was coming. This made Shepard's travel a little bit more harrowing, but the half-light of dusk helped to hide her from their sight.

It was as Shepard prepared her cloak around the corner from a group of these gang members that she was forced to stop. A phone rang in the pocket of one of the gang members, and Shepard's unique translator implant gave her instant fluency in old Japanese.

"What…Yeah?...Ok. We'll be there in five minutes." The man turned to his companions. "Lung calls us. We are attacking tonight. Go, grab your guns and gather at the meeting place. Do not be late."

The men scattered, all heading in different directions, and Shepard cloaked herself to stay out of sight. Now there was a dilemma. Attack? Who were they attacking? Regardless of their target it couldn't be good. But was investigating worth the delay in getting answers? Shepard didn't have long to decide, so she went with her instincts. They were rarely wrong.

She ducked around the corner and hid behind a dumpster in the alleyway. She had eyes on the gang member with the phone. He would be the best one to follow. It took another minute of watching the man mess with a 20th Century pistol at his hip before the man decided it was time to go and started off.

He headed deeper into the gang's territory, as Shepard had anticipated, and never once saw the commando moving unnaturally quietly in armor behind him. As they travelled, more people began to appear, all headed in the same direction, all armed to some degree. For some it was pistols, others, knives, and still others had nothing more than a baseball bat or golf club. It was a true mob, but none of them spoke, all moving with grim determination to their destination.

Eventually they reached a sort of square, boxed in on the outside by a number of warehouses, and stopped. In the middle of the square but set a bit off to one side was a monster of a man standing on a ramshackle stage made of wooden crates. He was not any taller than the average person, but he was muscled almost as much as James Vega. He had dragon tattoos spiraling around his torso and down his arms, and he had a metal dragon mask over his face. He was obviously the leader of this rally, and the gang members began to congregate around him.

Shepard, having found her destination, passed back behind the warehouses to give herself a concealed place to ascend to the rooftop. A quick burst of biotics threw her up to the roof, and she crawled to the edge of the roof and readied herself for a long wait.

It was another hour before the square filled up, and Shepard's hips were sore from lying prone behind her rifle for so long. But she didn't move, still waiting for the masked man to speak. The heads up display inside her helmet gave her an audio feed from the man, but for the last hour all she had heard was silence and the occasional forceful exhale.

The waiting was getting to her. Hours of sneaking followed by an hour of waiting was really getting on her nerves. That wasn't to say she couldn't handle it. Not at all. She didn't master every specialization the N-school offered just to quit after a few hours of boredom. That didn't mean she liked it, though.

Shepard was really a Vanguard at heart. She reveled in the savagery of gun, omniblade, and biotics in close combat, and she craved its rhythm and focus. Where other biotics had to be trained to use the basic Pull and Warp techniques, Shepard had figured out a rudimentary Biotic Charge before she even got her amp.

Once she got her L3 amp, however, she was found to have one of the highest biotic potentials ever recorded; so much so that she spiked higher than an L2 biotic as an L3. The military, who gave her the amp in the first place, pressed her to train for the Adept specialization, so Shepard completed it in record time, finding the normal battlefield control techniques to be simple applications of her power. In an unprecedented move she then sequentially enlisted and completed the Vanguard and Sentinel specializations.

After completing all of these before she turned 21, She was invited to the Villa, colloquially known as N-school. She was the youngest to ever be invited to the program, yet she still passed with flying colors, so she returned. After again setting records in training to become an N2, she took a "break" and decided to complete a couple of special forces missions before testing for N3. She always returned with nothing less to say than "mission accomplished," and thus was sent to investigate the colony of Akuze.

On Akuze Shepard was broken. The colony had recently gone dark for unknown reasons, and Shepard and her team were sent in to investigate. Upon reaching the emergency beacon, they were ambushed by a pair of thresher maws, giant burrowing worms that spit acid at range and will eat people by burrowing the ground out from underneath their feet. After a day and a half of endlessly fighting to escape and seeing her friends and squadmates crushed, eaten, and dissolved in front of her, Shepard was extracted as the only survivor. The loss of her team was a huge blow. She had spent so long being nothing but the best and always facing success that she had almost begun to believe her own hype. She _was_ a prodigy. She _was_ invincible. But she was not, and in her own arrogance she had gotten her whole team killed.

With this in mind, Shepard took indefinite leave of the military and decided on a sabbatical on the colony planet Elysium. After a year and a half of self-destructive thoughts and long nights at various bars, the universe decided that it wasn't done with her. The Skyllian Blitz, a massive raid by a number of batarian pirate bands, hit Elysium and Shepard was again thrown onto the front lines. But instead of despairing at her misfortune, Shepard found a new reason to fight. She was the last line of defense between a mob of batarian slavers and the defenseless civilians of the city.

Fighting with only her biotics and whatever weapons she could pull from the bodies of her enemies, Shepard made herself a threat that the slavers couldn't ignore. While the small local garrison and the militia held off the front lines of slavers and the civilians hurried into bunkers, Shepard threw herself at the batarians' chosen landing zones. Telekinetically crashing dropships into each other and eviscerating any batarian to get their boots on the ground, Shepard gave the people enough time to reach defensible positions. Then she drew back and joined them. What followed was what was once called Shepard's crowning achievement.

The "Lioness of Elysium," as the locals called her, led ten marines and a handful of brave militiamen in holding off hundreds of batarians and their gunships for five and a half hours, when the Alliance Navy arrived with reinforcements. When the bodies left behind and the missing persons were counted, the colony had lost eleven marines out of a garrison of twenty, fifty-seven civilians out of a colony of twenty-three thousand, and Shepard and her group had six hundred and twenty-one confirmed kills, plus unmatched body parts to approximately another eighty bodies.

Though she felt guilty about the few she couldn't save, Shepard recognized that she had saved many more than anyone, even she, had a right to hope for. With her head on straight and new determination in her eyes Shepard headed back to the Villa. For her twenty-fifth birthday she was recognized as the youngest and most accomplished N7 graduate ever, holding almost half of the program's records.

Believing she could still become better, Shepard requested and received special dispensation to train her biotics for two years on Thessia with an Asari teacher. While there she caught the eye of a Justicar who was without a current project and agreed to teach her, with the condition that during her apprenticeship Shepard lived by their Code. Shepard agreed and spent those two years travelling around Asari space with her mentor, returning to the Alliance with a level of biotic power and control that had never been seen in their species.

With all these accomplishments she had already begun being held up as the greatest of humanity, and her later accomplishments, not to mention her Spectre career, only further heightened her fame. Yet here, in this backwards city, all her unmatched determination was being put to task keeping her from going ahead and shooting this man.

It was now well past dusk, and though the square was now almost full every man and woman down there was silent. All gazes were on the metal-masked man on the makeshift stage in the center, yet still he didn't speak. Finally the situation began to change.

At a not from the man, who was obviously their leader, a small group of lackeys pulled open one of the crates and began handing out antique guns and knives all the way down to baseball bats out to the gang members around them. Those who had brought their own quietly passed the weapons on to those behind them, and soon every person in the square brandished various mismatched weaponry.

Just as the leader raised his hand and all of the gang members turned back to him Shepard heard the soft noises of someone clambering up the fire escape on the side of the building opposite where she herself jumped up. Shepard quickly flexed that phantom muscle that activated her tactical cloak and turned to look at where the ladder led onto the roof.

The person who clambered up was the strangest looking thing Shepard had seen in a long time. At first Shepard thought it might be a rachni drone, but the mass of hair that quickly followed the girl's head proved otherwise. The girl who scuttled up onto the roof wore a complex costume that invoked imagery of insects and arachnids, with carapace armoring over vital areas and a mask that was all orange eyes and mandibles. A greyish brown weave covered the rest of her body, and her hands were even covered with clawed carapace gauntlets. Shepard didn't know what would possess a teenager to wear such ridiculous clothing but she had to admit that the craftsmanship was superb. Aside from husks it might have been the creepiest looking human she had ever seen.

Still lying motionless and unseen, Shepard watched as the girl crouched down a few feet away and peeked over at the gang members below. She could hear the leader speaking, but dared not look away from the most immediate threat.

"… the children, just shoot. Doesn't matter your aim, just shoot. You see one lying on the ground? Shoot the little bitch twice more to be sure. We give them no chances to be clever or lucky, understand?"

The small gasp Shepard heard from the girl mirrored her own feelings on the matter, but it didn't change a whole lot. Shepard had surmised from the words she overheard from the gang members earlier that night that something along these lines was going to happen. The fact that the targets were kids only made her decisions more clear. She was no longer playing police. She would solve this problem by exercising the most final authority of a Spectre.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

 **A/N: Hey, everyone! I was really overwhelmed by the positive response the pilot of this story got! Thank you all for giving this a read, and please feel free to give me feedback. Even flames, if you like. I'm not so invested that my world will fall apart over a bad review. And, as a final point before I get to the main chapter: Rogue is a lifestyle, Rouge is a color. That is all.**

* * *

Before Shepard could realign her sniper rifle with the leader below her, a massive swarm of insects billowed over the rooftop, coalescing into a cloud of ominous buzzing and chittering, and then rushed down onto the gang. Reacting to the new threat and anticipating a Collector's seeker swarm, she spun around, her cloak crackling away, and cast her gaze about for the telltale sets of four orange eyes that betrayed Collectors' positions. Yet the only thing there were the astonished orange lenses of the bug costumed girl on the roof beside her.

Shepard silently cursed herself for losing track of her cloak's charge and rapidly aligned her sniper rifle with the girl's masked head. The girl panicked, realizing just then that she was not as alone on the roof as she had thought. The girl scrambled backwards and raised her hands in surrender.

"Wait! I'm a hero!" she hissed, trying to get her words across without giving away her position to the gang below who were still occupied with the . Shepard had no idea what that meant, but it was obvious at that point that the girl was not threat.

"Stay down," she ordered, pointing at the back edge of the roof. When the girl didn't move, she sighed violently and turned back to the roof's edge, expecting to still see panicking gang members below.

Instead she was slammed backwards by the leader, who was now easily eight feet tall and covered silver scales and wreathed in fire which surrounded him like a biotic halo.

 _The fuck?_ Rolling backwards into a crouch she stowed her Black Widow against her back, but before she could finish drawing her shotgun the flaming man was on her again.

"I 'ill 'oo!" he shouted, his elongated snout slurring his words as flames jetted from his outstretched hand and bathed Shepard's armor and shields in fire. It achieved nothing except to knock her onto her back, but this was enough. While Shepard was momentary out of the fight the leader turned to watch the bug girl run for the fire escape, ignoring the clouds of stinging insects that buzzed around his personal inferno.

The girl, realizing she wouldn't have time to climb down before the increasingly large and scaly man reached her, searched desperately around for another avenue of escape but found nothing. Clinging to a feeble hope she pulled a can of pepper spray from the back of her armor and brandished it in front of herself.

The gang leader paused to bark out a low, rumbling laugh at the trembling girl in front of him, but that laugh turned into a bellow of outrage as the girl pressed down on the nozzle, then sprinted to the side to escape. She was out of luck. Even with chemicals burning his eyes the still-growing man was able to reach out and snag the girl by her mane of hair and hoist her screaming into the air.

"'ot 'oo," he rumbled, and his other hand, now fully transformed into a clawed gauntlet, burst into flame. He opened his maw again, presumably to speak, but whatever he was about to say was interrupted by a deafening boom and a spray of steaming viscera from what was left of the leader's head.

As the leader's body slumped to the ground, the girl celebrated her freedom by dropping to her hands and knees and coughing violently, gasping for breath and occasionally interjecting a sob into the mix.

Shepard rose from her crouch, compacting her sniper rifle and trading it out for her pistol, and scanned the area for other hostiles. The other gang members hadn't even tried to make it to the rooftop. As soon as their leader started to throw fire they had fled.

She considered the man's body while the girl pulled herself together. By the end of the fight the man must have been almost nine feet tall, covered in silver scales that she suspected would have deflected the shots from any of her other guns. At first she had thought it was some sort of adaptive hardsuit or tech armor, but now she could see that the man had grown a tail of all things. There was some key bit of information that she was missing, because under the laws of physics as she understood them, people don't turn into dragons.

Shepard reattached her pistol at her hip and strode up to the girl.

"Not the best survival instincts I've ever seen, but not the worst." She offered her hand down to the girl who was still hugging her knees on the floor. "Come on. Let's get you cleaned up." The girl nodded silently and took her hand, allowing Shepard to easily pull her to her feet. She hadn't noticed before while the girl was either crouching or sitting, but she was taller than Shepard by a couple of inches.

Shepard opened her omni-tool, the orange glow illuminating the other girl's mask. It looked even creepier in that light. As she searched through the device for a function that would let her clean the blood off the girl's mask, she heard her let out a tiny gasp. Shepard looked up, saw the girl staring over Shepard's left shoulder, and whirled around, fluidly drawing her shotgun mid-motion. _Really? We're not done yet?_

What she saw was another thing she couldn't explain. Actually, three of them. Leaping onto the other end of the rooftop were three monstrous animals being ridden by four other teenagers in costume. The animals were almost the size of a Kodiak shuttle and were covered in grey bony plates and spikes reminiscent of a less-tech-filled Reaper Brute. At a whistle from one of the figures the dogs halted and the kids hopped off.

Their costumes ranged from barely functional to ridiculous. One girl, whose figure made her look more like a man, wore street clothes with a cheap plastic dog mask. The other girl wore skin-tight purple spandex and a domino mask, her blonde hair and green eyes standing out as she took in the scene around them. The largest of the group was male, but he was entirely covered with a leather jacket, gloves, and a biker's helmet with a skull decal covering any exposed skin. The last was the least understandable. A kid with curly black hair and a frilly white shirt leaned languidly against the side of one of the beasts, twirling a small scepter in his hand. He wore a small crown on his head and, contrary to his lazy stance, was staring intently at Shepard.

The man in black stepped forward, indicating he was either the leader or the spokesperson of the group, and began to speak. "You guys really saved us a lot of trouble. When we got word Lung was aiming to come after us tonight, we were pretty freaked. We were arguing strategy for the better part of the day. We eventually decided, fuck it, we'd meet him halfway. Wing it. Not my usual way of doing things, but yeah." He looked warily over at the gang leader's, Lung's corpse. "It looks like you have things in hand though. Is he really dead?"

Shepard cocked a hip out to the side and said in a deadpan. "What, kid, never seen a dead body before? It doesn't get much deader than that."

The blonde in purple snapped her head toward Shepard and they locked eyes. Suddenly the girl's green eyes shot wide and she gasped. "Oh, fuck! Grue, we should go. Like, now."

"No rush, Tattletale. We're just introducing ourselves, then we'll head out." Grue? Tattletale? Either naming conventions were extraordinarily strange in this city or there were teenagers using codenames. Neither was a good sign.

"Nope! Thanksforthehelpgottagobye!" The girl grabbed the much larger boy by the elbow of his jacket and tried, ineffectually, to drag him back to their mounts. Gure shook her off and gave her an annoyed glare from behind his helmet.

"If you're not going to explain, we're going to talk to them." He turned back to Shepard and the bug girl. "Anyways, we're the Undersiders. That's Tattletale. I'm Grue. The girl with the dogs - We call her Bitch, her preference, but in the interests of being P.G., the good guys and media decided to call her Hellhound instead. Last and certainly least, we have Regent." he finished, pointing at the kid with the scepter who was still staring eerily at Shepard. "You girls have names?"

Shepard looked over at the bug girl. The girl hadn't said a word the entire time, and even now seemed to be shrinking away from a conversation. Shepard rode in to her rescue.

"No."

Grue straightened in surprise. "You – I thought. Okay, I guessed with costumes like that you would already have names."

Tattletale interrupted him again. "Grue, no joke. We have to go. Armsmaster in sixty seconds."

Grue looked back to the rest of his team, then nodded. He turned back to Shepard and the bug girl. "You two need a ride?"

Shepard shook her head, and after a moment the other girl mirrored it. "I can get around on my own, thanks." Grue nodded, and the four teenagers mounted their beasts and leapt over the side of the roof, their beasts bounding off into the darkness below.

As soon as they were gone, Shepard whirled on the other girl. "What the _hell_ is going on? Costumes? Codenames? The "good guys and the media"? What is this, Blasto cosplay week?"

As soon as Shepard had started talking, the girl had only squeaked and shrunk down to the floor of the roof, cowering away from the frustrated soldier above her. Shepard sighed, relaxing her stance and extending a hand to the girl curled up at her feet. She hadn't meant to be so intense to a traumatized girl. It was easy to forget she wasn't surrounded by soldiers anymore.

"Sorry, I'm just frustrated. I'm not going to hurt you. On your feet, kid." The girl hesitantly took Shepard's hand, and the soldier easily lifted her to her feet. "I'm just looking for some answers. What is with all of this costume stuff? And the bugs. Where did those come from?"

The girl still shied away from Shepard, but she answered. "Um. You're a cape right? How can you not know about this stuff?"

"A cape? I don't –" At that moment she heard a dull roaring sound, which quickly transformed into the roar of a motorcycle as a man in full power armor swerved around the side of the building and slowed to a stop right underneath them. Shepard sighed and looked pleadingly at the girl, then walked to the roof's edge and looked down at the man below her.

Even though his armor looked relatively advanced, it was no tech Shepard had ever seen. The armor was midnight blue with silver highlights, but where Shepard's armor was segmented and reinforced with ballistic weave and ablative plating, this man's looked to almost be one single piece. He also had no guns, which was what disturbed Shepard the most. Instead of a ranged weapon of any kind, this man seemed to think a _halberd_ would be effective. Granted, it was probably the most high-tech halberd the world had ever seen, but still. Put Shepard at thirty yards out or further and this guy couldn't hope to touch her.

While Shepard was criticizing the man's choice of armament in her head, the halberd man fired a grappling hook from the end of his weapon and flew up to the rooftop. _Huh. Maybe fifty yards._ He assessed the bug girl first, then spent far longer looking at Shepard. She was pretty sure it was her armor she was checking out, but the visor really made it look like he was undressing her with his eyes.

"Eyes up here, soldier." When his head snapped up she smirked. "Now I know –"

The man interrupted her with a sharp bark of a question. "Are you going to fight me?"

"We're good guys!" The bug girl paused after her unexpected outburst and looked at Shepard "Or at least, I'm a good guy."

Shepard glanced over at her, somewhat offended. It was the other girl who was covered in blood and brain matter. But she supposed the accusation wasn't unwarranted. She did blow off a guy's head right in front of her. She turned her attention back to the halberd man, whose hands had strayed to the haft of his weapon. "Nah, I'm a good guy too. Just a bit more violent than I think she expected." Shepard got only a blank stare from the armored man until he took a closer look at the giant, scaled man lying on the roof behind them.

"You killed him." He said it as a statement more than a question, which Shepard appreciated. It was nice not having to explain the obvious.

"Yep. Pretty easy shot actually. I've never fought a guy who gets bigger as you go, though. It was fun, but short." The man's hand was back on the weapon across his back, and he nodded sharply at the two girls.

"Explain."

The bug girl took a breath and started her story. "Well, tonight's my first night out and I was going out to patrol, so when I ran into Lung and his gang I thought I'd head somewhere else."

"It would have been a good idea," the armored man stated, "but you're still here."

"Yeah. I heard them talking about killing kids so I couldn't just _let_ that happen, so I stayed. I only realized after I attacked Lung that she was here too."

"You two don't know each other?"

This time it was Shepard who replied. "No. We don't."

"Then why are you here?"

"I followed a gang member here after he mentioned some kind of attack. Once I got here I set up on this roof. I waited a few hours, the bug girl here showed up, attacked the big guy –Lung, you said? – and then I killed him."

"Just like that?"

"Just like that. Anti-material rifle"

The armored man thought about that for a moment, then nodded as if to himself and refocused on the bug girl. "You know you could have been seriously hurt or killed tonight."

"Y-" Her voice broke as she was reminded of her near brush with death. "Yes. I know."

"This is why we have the Wards program. To help new powered kids like you learn to use their powers in a safe environment. You really should think about signing up."

The girl had no response to this, and the armored man seemed to accept that. He turned to Shepard. You claim you were merely investigating and defending this girl, but you did kill a man. Justified or not we still need you to come in and answer some questions."

While this could be the opening Shepard was looking for to speak with the authorities and get her questions answered, she was hesitant. This man had very conveniently shown up not five minutes after she had killed Lung and was expecting her to just follow him to an undisclosed location with no proof of his authority or of who he was.

She voiced her concern aloud. "Let's slow down for just a second. Who are you, and why do you have the authority to do the police's job? Why should I follow you anywhere?"

"I am Armsmaster of the Protectorate East-Northeast." His annoyance started to slip through into his tone. "The responsibility of dealing with dangerous and potentially hostile capes falls to us because the normal police can't handle powered criminals, and you should come with me because if you don't I will be forced to bring you in by force."

None of this information actually helped Shepard to know who this "Armsmaster" was or where they were, and the "by force" part of his spiel sounded a lot like something Cerberus would do. In fact, she wouldn't be surprised if Cerberus were behind this whole scenario, planting a technologically backwards city on some planet and then setting themselves up as semi-benevolent overlords.

Shepard really didn't want to have to deal with conspiracies this late at night, so she readied her trump card. "Look, 'Armsmaster.' It's late and I really don't want to have to deal with this, so you're going to head one way and I'll head the other, and maybe I'll see you around sometime."

Armsmaster's hand was back on the haft of his halberd. "I can't let you do that. You need to come in to speak with my superiors."

Shepard smirked under her helmet. "Spectre immunity, Armsmaster. My authority overrules yours and your superiors'." She turned to the bug girl, who had been looking back and forth between the two armored people as they spoke. "Well, kid, I wish you luck. Try not to get killed by any more dragon men. I should go."

And with that, Shepard activated her tactical cloak and left behind two bewildered capes by themselves on the roof.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

 **A/N: So there were some questions about the decision-making last chapter. Worry not, things will be explained here. As FTomato said, you don't ignore the Thinker. Unless… well, you'll see. Tattletale was having a bad day.**

It had been fairly easy to find a place to stay the night – or morning, now. This city, or at least this area of the city, was filled with abandoned buildings. The warehouses around were all built sturdily so despite their age and neglect Shepard still trusted them to not collapse while she slept. She had particular fortune when she found one that had an upper room, which she supposed must have been some sort of loft from which managers could watch over the workers.

The loft looked relatively unclaimed, aside from the broken glass and three grimy socks scattered across the floor, so she figured it would be safe enough for the night. There were no furnishings, but she had slept on worse ground before. Her decision made, she shoved aside her exhaustion for just a bit longer and began maintenance on her equipment.

First off was her helmet. It looked like it had survived her earlier skirmish unscathed, but on closer inspection she found some scuffing on the back where she had slid after eating one of Lung's fireballs. It was nothing the armor's auto-repair function wouldn't fix overnight, so she set the helmet aside.

She then reached around behind her back to the clasps for her breastplate. With a pop and the slight hissing of air the front and back halves of it separated, the front falling forwards into her waiting arms and the back still clinging to her body. She set the grey armor in a clean spot on the floor and pulled the back half off, setting it next to its partner. These two pieces were only slightly scuffed as well, but one of the interlocking pieces that went over her spine was slightly misaligned. With a wave of her omnitool the grey bit snapped back in place.

The rest of her inspections progressed similarly, with only her pistol needing any real work. When Lung had knocked her backwards she had landed on her hip, right on top of the heavy pistol. Normally the firearm would have been tough enough to handle that, but Lung's fire must have been hotter than she expected. The combination of heat and force had warped the body of the gun just enough that it wouldn't unfold fully.

If Shepard had her tools with her this wouldn't be a huge problem. She could remove the bent paneling, reshape it, strengthen it, and reattach it, but unfortunately she didn't keep her tools on her. They were permanent residents of whatever ship she served on, and had been under Ashley's or Jacob's control ever since she had taken command of the Normandy. The hours spent tinkering with her weapons to have them exactly how she liked them always paid off, but now some of the riskier modifications she made to the Paladin pistol were coming back to haunt her.

The magazine modification she had added had necessitated a slight thinning of the protective coating on the gun, and that thinness was what prevented her from just bending the gun's plating back in place. Doing so would leave imperfections in the metal that would make it brittle and prone to warping out of place again as the gun heated up in battle. She would have to keep it stowed away for now until she found somewhere with the tools to melt down and reforge the paneling.

Setting the compacted pistol next to her armor on the floor and pulling out her Tempest sub-machine gun, Shepard finally laid down to sleep. Her omnitool would warn her if anyone got too close, and she had her weapons and biotics for defense. It was in the middle of hazy thoughts about anachronistic cities and seeker swarm teenagers that she finally drifted off.

* * *

The next day Collin Wallis stood in one of the PRT meeting rooms next to a white board, marker in hand, and addressed the various Protectorate heroes and Wards arrayed before him.

"We have two new capes on the scene in the Bay." This was met with subdued mumbling and a bit of fidgeting. "Neither of them are named, so I have taken the liberty of giving them temporary codenames until either they give us one or the media catches on. We will call them 'Specter' and 'Bug' for now." He reached out to the board and wrote the names at the top, then underlined them.

"Specter?" It was Battery who spoke up, raising her hand slightly. "That's an unusual temp name."

Armsmaster nodded. "Yes. She referenced "Spectre authority," leading me to believe that this word meant something to her. It also fits well with the cloaking tech I observed, thus, the name." He returned to his scripted presentation.

"Both of these new capes are female. One is an adult of undetermined age, but I would estimate she is in her early to mid-thirties. The second, Bug, who insisted to me that she was not associated with Specter after Specter left, is Wards age. I had a more extensive conversation with Bug after Specter left, so I will begin the briefing with her.

"Her power, as far as I can tell, is a sort of arthropod-kinesis, or bug control. She demonstrated extreme multitasking abilities sufficient to individually control the actions of each insect in a cloud at the same time, while still holding her conversation with me. With those two things in mind I have rated her a Master 2 and Thinker 1.

"As far as her disposition goes, a lot can be said by the fact that she chose to fight Lung on her first night out. Heroic, but lacking in self-preservation. I believe we can get her to join the Wards if she meets some of them on patrol." Armsmaster paused and took a sip of water from the bottle on one of the tables beside him. As he replaced the cap he began to speak again.

"Specter, on the other hand, is highly dangerous. She was in advanced power armor which, contrary to the norms for newly triggered tinkers, was sleek and streamlined. Her armor, however was not the extent of her weaponry. She had an advanced cloaking device and she held various tinkertech firearms, two of which were a pistol and a sniper rifle. The latter she used to kill Lung." At this Armsmaster was forced to glare at the rest of the heroes until they quieted down.

"Yes, Lung is dead. His body is in the morgue downstairs. Regardless, due to the advanced nature of her armor and the power of her weapons, which were able to kill a partially transformed Lung in a single shot, as well as the demonstration of her cloak, I have rated her a Tinker 6, with no information on her specialty. Additionally, my own power gained no information from observing her tech. This is highly unusual for tinkers, and thus I have added on a Trump 1 to her rating.

"As far as Specter's temperament goes, I would place her as highly unlikely to join the Protectorate. She has a very Vigilante type outlook, and she immediately aimed to kill Lung instead of subduing him. Everyone should approach her with caution, and the Wards should not approach her at all. She will be placed as a tentative Independent Hero, but that could change quickly to Villain if she becomes more violent. Questions?"

* * *

As soon as the door to their hideout slammed shut behind them, Grue whirled on Tattletale. "What the hell was going on with you tonight, huh? First you tell us that Oni Lee will stick with Lung and Alec almost gets his throat cut, and then you say that Lung will be open to making a deal? If those other two capes hadn't been there he would have _slaughtered_ us!" When Lisa's only response was to groan and massage her temples, Brian dropped his raised arms and stalked over to the couch. "Spill. Why did you give us so much bullshit information tonight?"

Lisa's voice was quiet and subdued, a stark contrast to the slight teasing that always bled through into her tone. "I don't know."

"You don't know? But knowing is your thing."

"I know it's my thing, okay! It was just… My power was really confusing tonight. It kept changing its mind, like it wasn't sure. And then that woman? The one in armor? When I looked at her it started _asking questions_. All I got from her was that she'd killed before. A lot. And that she didn't think the law applied to her."

Grue's face shifted from a glare to a frown. He leaned forward over his knees and rested his chin on his fists. "Your power asked questions? What do you mean?"

"Normally my power tells me things. Like, I look at you now and it says 'Frustrated. Confused. Doesn't understand how your power works. Wants to protect the team.' If I let it really off its leash it'll start drawing conclusions from its conclusions until I get the information I need. But with her, my power just said she killed a lot of people and then it had nothing."

Grue nodded, and the whole room was silent for a while. Eventually Alec stood from his spot on the couch beside Brian and turned on one of his gaming consoles. The sound of lasers and virtual combat filled the room.

"So what are we going to do about it? Is this a long-term problem?"

"I don't know. I think it's centered around her, though."

"So we need to find her and figure this out. I'm not going to risk these mistakes getting us killed."

Alec cut in. "Dude, this lady killed tons of people, remember? You guys can go find her, but I'm going to stay here and take your stuff if you die."

"She didn't kill us immediately when we showed up, so she's at least willing to talk first. We'll go out and find her tomorrow."

Tattletale was not enthused with this, but she nodded anyway. "Sure."

* * *

Shepard woke to shaking. She snapped to awareness and palmed the pistol that laid by her side, then reached for her helmet with her other hand. She missed, instead punching the piece across the room. _What?_ It wasn't the room that was shaking. She was.

It was as she climbed to her feet to go pick up the runaway helmet that sat in a patch of morning sunlight that she realized just how miserable she was. She felt sick, her hands shook, and her legs barely supported her. _Have I been poisoned?_ She realized that she had. Looking back over the entirety of the day before, she realized that her memories were covered in a haze. Everything felt like a story being told to her instead of something that she did herself.

She executed that Skidmark guy? Okay, yeah. She would have done that anyways. But her fight with Lung was sloppy. The guy was on fire, sure, but dodging a fireball is even easier than dodging one of Harbinger's biotic bombs. That should have been clean up.

She winced when she thought back to her conversations with everyone she met. That big girl, the armor guy, and those costumed teenagers. The Undersiders? She thought that's what they called themselves. She bet they all thought her a fool. _Rule Number One of Infiltrator training: If you really don't know, make shit up and say it with confidence._ She hadn't thought to take the time to really figure out where she was, and thus she had blundered around in those conversations, revealing to anyone astute enough to notice that she was completely lost. She'd have to make better first impressions in the future.

She also really needed to get some bearings on her surroundings. Picking up her helmet and setting it beside herself, Shepard opened up her omintool. No extranet? She guessed that fit. It was a pretty old looking place. There was a network, though, and her omnitool's repurposed Shepard VI set up a link. April 12, 2011. Shepard sat back, eyes wide. That was a shock. Although she supposed it wasn't impossible. That bug girl had superpowers, so it was possible that time travel, no, alternate dimensions – there were no superpowers in 2011 as far as she remembered – was common knowledge here.

She winced. Had she really just traipsed around a city in 2011 in armor that was cutting edge technology 175 years later? She had used her tactical cloak liberally, but still. _Well, there goes any thought I could have had about timeline contamination._ It was probably best if she touched up on her history, though, so she spent the next hour and a half reading up on the local history. It was very strange and somewhat tedious, but at least it gave her time for the shakes to die down. Some water would be nice, though.

After becoming familiar with the history of this "Earth Bet," she moved on to the local cape scene. Brockton Bay. It was an awful dynamic, and Shepard truly wondered how the authorities let it get this bad. The city was split into fourths, with the white-supremacist Empire Eighty Eight perpetually at war with the Azn Bad Boyz. _That's really what they call themselves?_ The Protectorate and PRT controlled parts of downtown, and the Merchants ran around the parts of the city that no one else wanted. Coil was in there somewhere, but nobody really knew anything about him, and the smaller groups like the Undersiders sort of did their own thing and avoided the larger ones if they could.

On the upside, in one day Shepard had cut off the heads of two of the large organizations. Shepard, 2, Earth Bet, 0. Maybe Bet 1. Getting drugged wasn't fun. Anyway, from what she understood it was only Lung who was keeping the balance between the E88 and the ABB, so the city was now primed for a Nazi takeover. On the upside, this did make prioritizing easier.

Goal number one, kill Kaiser. She smirked. _If it were me, you and Hitler in a room, and I had two bullets..._ _Well. We'll see what happens._

Goal number two, figure out what's up with Coil. He actually seemed like the biggest threat. Shady guy – _Illusive maybe?_ – that nobody has the time to worry about but who somehow has a lot of money and tech? Who always seems to win the battles that he picks? Who leads a paramilitary group? It screamed Cerberus, and she would take a lot of pleasure in wiping it out. She would need better intel for that though, so it would come after stabilizing the E88 situation.

All of this would be a lot harder on her own, though. She needed a team, ones who she could count on like she could the Normandy crew, and ones who would follow her orders to the T. The authorities were out. If they were anything like that Armsmaster they were too stuck in their ways to follow a new leader. New Wave had potential, but they all sounded like they had a terminal case of public relations. Shepard punched reporters, so they wouldn't get along. The Undersiders were used to working outside the law, but they were really not the military type. That bug girl, though… She had been pretty shaken by the Lung encounter, but she had never frozen. She fought even with useless weapons until the end. She'd do.

Now if she could only find her. Maybe through this PHO forum? It seemed like the place where capes went to chat. She needed an account name though, and she figured she might as well get a Verified Cape account while she was at it. She opened up the site and logged in. Cape name… Oh! With a smirk she tried Catalyst. Nope. It was taken by some chemical tinker in New Zealand. Commander and Shepherd were taken as well. _Spectre it is_. She tried it out. _How is that not taken yet? Invisible people are so uncreative._ She made her password "Normandy," and within ten minutes she had sent a fully armored photo of herself to the moderator Tin_Mother. She got a response almost immediately

 **Welcome to the Parahumans Online Message Boards**

You are currently logged in, Spectre (Verified Cape)

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You have no infractions.

 **Private message from Tin_Mother:**

 **Spectre:** Hey, Tin_Mother. I just wanted to get my account verified. Here's a photo: [HOLO_ ]

 **Tin_Mother:** This is in three-dimensional format.

 **Spectre:** Um... Oops? More proof, I guess.

 **Tin_Mother:** I'll verify your account. Is Spectre going to be your cape name as well?

 **Spectre** : Yep. Thanks for the help.

 **Spectre:** I just checked, and that name is open to use. You are welcome.

With that taken care of, Shepard began searching for any sign of the bug girl. Searches for "insect" gave a couple of insect-themed capes from around the world, but nothing on anyone in her area. She kept looking. After nearly an hour of looking she stumbled across a new thread. There was a lone post in the Connections section of the site, followed by a couple of other ones speculating about what it could mean.

 **Subject:** Bug and Rifle

Owe you both. Would like to repay the favor. Meet?

Tt.

Now this was interesting, and slightly ingenious. To someone like Shepard who had the right context, this was obviously a message to her and the bug girl, from Tattletale. To anyone on the outside, however, this would be an extremely vague and unhelpful post. She messaged the account that posted that, and soon had a response. They would all meet, Shepard, Undersiders and Bug, at the place of Lung's death tonight at eleven.

 **A/N: Yeah, so Shepard's cybernetics don't immediately cure her of everything. In my headcanon, at least, they just allow her to function past the limits where others would break. She executed Skidmark at the "I'm no longer seeing dancing rhinos" stage in detox, but was still full of drugs for the rest of the first two chapters. LawlessWriter, shoutout for reading my mind. Also, Tattletale's power got screwed up by all the "That's not real science!" that happened to put Shepard here.**

 **TL:DR: Shepard sleeps off her high, Armsmaster briefs the heroes, Tattletale says WTF, and Shepard eats the internet.**


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter 4**

 **A/N: Sorry about the longer wait. It's hard to type when your hand is mangled more than a Left4Dead ad. It's healed enough to type slowly so I'm back to work, but it'll be slow progress for another week or two. Enjoy!**

* * *

Deep beneath the city in an unmarked bunker the supervillain Coil sat brooding behind his desk. Word had reached him through his contacts in the PRT that a new Tinker was in play, and by all accounts she was no slouch.

There had been no signs of the usual patterns of a new tinker – junkyard raids, suspicious electronics purchases, or otherwise – and yet this new cape appeared with effective, streamlined, and more surprisingly, _varied_ gear. Even more usefully, this Tinker appeared to have a military specialization. Her "recruitment" into his ranks could significantly impact the effectiveness of his mercenaries. The only potential hiccup in his plan was the information he had gotten from Tattletale.

When the Undersiders had returned from their potential face-off with Lung Coil had called Tattletale into his base to discuss what she had learned from the new capes. He had split the timeline, of course, and while he spoke civilly to the girl in one timeline he was inserting needles under her fingernails in the other. He had to ensure that the information she gave him could be trusted, and once he ascertained that the information she gave him was genuine he collapsed the torture timeline. The fear on the healthy Tattletale's face as her power told her that something was wrong was always a bonus.

The information itself was both useful and troubling. The bug controller, should he ever want to deal with such a weak cape, would be an easy target. Home troubles and a nearly suicidal mental state made her an easy target either for recruitment or coercion. It was most likely in that case that he would push the Undersiders angle. Tattletale had revealed to him that the girl wanted friends most of all, so he could simply induct her into the Undersiders.

The Tinker, however, had terrified Tattletale. She was ex-special forces, but it was unclear from which organization. Additionally, Tattletale swore that she was an experienced killer. To Coil this suggested that before her trigger she was an international mercenary probably straight from employment under one of Africa's many warlords. If she had come out of that hellhole with her life and new powers this Tinker could truly be a valuable resource.

But she was too old for the Undersiders. Coil would contact her directly with an offer just as soon as he could find any way to pin her down.

* * *

Shepard lay on her stomach on the roof of a building six blocks away from the meeting point, her Black Widow braced against her shoulder and her visor lined up behind the scope. She had been there for nearly an hour watching over the area and so far there had been no sign of a trap. She hadn't thought there would be, but it was always prudent to make sure. It was a new city with a social structure that was only familiar enough to make her complacent, so she put extra effort into her security measures.

She was fully armored up for this meeting and she left nothing behind at the warehouse where she slept. Even her broken hand cannon was magnetized to her hip. She had taken extra care to prepare herself for the powers of these "capes" that she was meeting, and thus she had prioritized the servos in her armor that were useful in hand-to-hand combat over her kinetic barrier. None of these capes looked to have long range abilities or weapons, so a weakened barrier ought to suffice.

Finally something moved. Just as she spotted the bug girl clambering up the fire escape under a roiling mass of flying insects the Undersiders rode in from the other direction. After a few more seconds looking down the scope Shepard stowed her weapon and dropped the two stories to the ground. Only a soft grunt escaped as she landed to acknowledge the height. Thirty seconds later she was pulling herself up over the lip of the roof next to the bug girl.

"Evening, all." The Undersiders all returned her greeting with the exception of Bitch, who just grunted. The bug girl shifted away from her and closer to Shepard. "So you said you wanted to meet to say thanks."

Tattletale took over the conversation from there. "Yep. Here. These are for each of you." She pulled two lunchboxes out of one of the saddlebags on Bitch's dogs and held them out. Shepard and the bug girl each took theirs, and a discrete use of her omnitool showed Shepard that the hero on the front was Legend, a member of the Triumvirate. Inside were stacks of dollar bills.

"Two grand each, as a sort of thank you along with an offer."

The bug girl, whose voice betrayed her inexperience with sums of money coming anywhere close to that amount, spoke up. "An offer?"

Tattletale nodded. "There's more where that come from." At this point it was obvious she was only addressing the bug girl. "We wanted to offer you a spot-" She was interrupted by a snort from Bitch. "-a _spot_ , on our team."

"You think I want to be a _villain_?!"

Regent idly twirled his scepter. "Well, yeah. Look at your costume, dork." Now that Shepard actually looked at Regent beyond cursory threat assessment, she realized he was staring at her again. She glared back at him even though he couldn't see it through the visor of her helmet. Tattletale ignored their byplay and continued.

"Hey, hey, it's not as bad as you think it is. This whole heroes and villains thing? Cops and robbers. I mean seriously. Grown men and women are dressing up in spandex and beating the shit out of each other in the streets. Also, the heroes can't survive without us and they know it. Where would they go if there weren't any villains? As long as you don't cross the line like the Slaughterhouse 9 then you get the kid gloves. So that's what we do. The heroes get to worship their almighty PR machine and we dress up, scuffle a bit, make some money, and have fun." The bug girl still didn't look convinced. "When we go out no one but the bad guys get hurt. Lung was after us because we robbed his casino last week."

At this Shepard decided it was time use all of the research she did the night before. "That's all a very nice sentiment, but you've forgotten an important point."

Tattletale's eyes narrowed behind her domino mask. "Really?"

"Yes. Both Regent and Tattletale are wanted for murder. It sounds like you're trying to mislead Bug here – and I have a couple of suggestions for your name, too."

"That's not-!"

"I'm not done. Cops and robbers is a joke. Do you really believe you're doing no harm? Directly, maybe. But in the long run you're hurting the entire system of law. You're drawing important resources away from, like you said, those who have crossed the line. Why are people like the Slaughterhouse 9 and the Fallen still around when the Triumvirate could take a day and wipe them out? It's because of people like you. The heroes are tied down by the chaos you represent. In that sense you're worse that the Empire or the ABB. They're predictable. They're stable. If Miss Militia decides to take a week off the Empire isn't going to lead an assault on the PHQ. But if the heroes were out of town for a day can you really tell me you wouldn't go rob a bank?" Tattletale had nothing to say to that.

"I thought so. You seem to think the job of the heroes is to scuffle in the streets with you. It's not. Remember the Endbringer? What do you think Armsmaster could build to fight them if you weren't forcing him to spend his time building things to fight you? A portion of the lives lost to the Endbringers sits on your heads. If you had any sense of civic duty you would work _with_ the heroes instead of against them.

"Now, Bug, I actually have an offer for you as well. I'm new in the city, and I've decided to build a team. I want you on it. I don't have money to offer you, but my goals are simple. My crosshairs are on each of the gangs in the city. I've already decapitated the Merchants and the ABB, so next up are Kaiser and Coil. After that, either the Endbringers or other roaming terrors like The Slaughterhouse 9 and the Blasphemies. This world is falling apart around us, and I'm going to save it. I think you have the drive to step up and do it with me."

Silence. No one spoke, and only the sound of cars blocks away broke the stunned haze that seemed to fall over the teens around her. Bug finally spoke up.

"You really think you can get rid of the gangs?"

"Yes."

"The S-class threats?"

"Yes."

"The endbringers?"

"Nothing lives that cannot die."

More silence.

Finally Bug addressed the Undersiders. "I can't accept your offer. I've always wanted to be a hero, and now I finally have a chance to do it." Yellow lenses locked gazes with Shepard's visor. "I'll join your team."

* * *

It was well into the morning hours by the time Shepard and Bug returned to Shepard's temporary hideout. The meeting with the Undersiders had concluded fairly quickly after Bug's proclamation and the assurance that Shepard and Bug would _not_ use lethal force if they ever went after them. That was as much as the N7 was willing to grant them. Tattletale had wanted a sort of truce, but since they weren't particularly useful as allies Shepard had seen no reason to grant it to them. Taking the hard line against villains seemed to please some part of Bug as well. The two of them had then decided that they should head somewhere secure to set up a way of contacting each other and Shepard had suggested her residence as of the night before.

Bug had looked skeptical when she saw the crumbling façade of the warehouse, and looked almost revolted when the door opened to reveal a hastily cleared floor with broken glass and used needles piled in the corner.

"You know, with the state of your armor I kind of expected something more… hero-y. And clean. Definitely something cleaner."

"This isn't my actual home, or base. I settled for this place last night. If I were planning on staying here long-term I would have cleaned up a bit more, but it served its purpose."

"Its purpose?"

"Giving me a place to sleep for the night until I can find a real place to stay." Shepard sat down on the concrete floor then patted the spot next to her. "Sit down. Or don't, if you prefer. The floor is pretty uncomfortable, but if we're going to be working together I need to explain a few things."

Bug brushed away debris from a spot on the floor then sat cross-legged in front of Shepard, her orange lenses focused on Shepard's visor. Shepard nodded at her choice, then reached up to the clasps on the back of her helmet.

"My name," she began as she removed her helmet, her red hair falling in tangles down to her shoulders, "is Commander Erin Shepard, N7. I have been called many things, the most common being the Lioness of Elysium, the Butcher of Torfan, Hero of the Citadel, and the Hero of the Reaper War. But none of this means anything to you, because I'm not from your world."

Shepard could feel Bug's blank stare even through her mask.

"Where I'm from, the year was 2192. Humanity had expanded into the stars, building and colonizing across the galaxy. We met other species who had done the same, and we were welcomed into the galactic community. Then the Reapers came, and I was the head of the war that led to their defeat. In 2192 the entire galaxy was focused on rebuilding, and I was being hounded be reporters day in and day out. Then I woke up dazed and drugged in this city. And no, I don't know how I got here."

Bug's expression was unchanged.

"I spent the night and day after the confrontation with Lung researching your world, so I can fairly confidently say that I am aware of the basic facts, but I'm still a bit shaky on customs and other things not explicitly stated on the internet. You're going to have to help me out with that. But, regardless, I am not a parahuman. I suspect that Armsmaster and the Undersiders have labeled me as one, but this is merely my custom arsenal from the war. Any questions so far?"

By watching the stretching of her mask Shepard could see Bug open her mouth, close it, open it again, then finally find her words.

"You're from another _world?_ "

Shepard frowned. "Yes. We went over this." She paused with a smirk. "But I do realize it's a little unusual. Didn't a Professor Haywire open up a portal to another dimension here? I suspect my arrival had something to do with that."

"Okay… so you got here a few days ago –"

"The same day we fought Lung, actually."

"Right. You said you woke up drugged?"

"Yep. This guy named Skidmark thought I was a Tinker too and wanted me to work for him. Tried to drug me up enough that I couldn't say no. Too bad for him my cybernetics let me fight through nearly anything. When he tried to turn "drugged recruitment" into "date rape" I killed him."

"… You killed him, too."

"Yes."

"If I'm going to be a part of your team I'm not going to kill anyone."

"Not even Jack Slash?"

Bug sighed. "Fine. I'm not going to kill anyone who doesn't _really_ deserve it. And you need to follow that rule too."

Shepard grinned. "Wow. Ten minutes in and she's already bossing me around. By next week it'll be 'Oi! Minion! Fetch me a supervillain!'"

Bug hunched over as she shrank away from Shepard's teasing. "It's not like that! It's just, killing is sort of against the rules."

At this Shepard sat forward. "The rules? What do you mean?"

"The Unwritten Rules. It's a sort of code everyday Heroes and Villains live by. You don't try to find out someone's civilian identity. You don't kill in a fight. You don't take advantage of someone once they've lost. It keeps things civil and allows Capes to focus on the Endbringers when it comes time."

At this Shepard frowned. "That's a lot of restrictions. Red tape."

Bug nodded, sympathizing with some of Shepard's frustration. "I know. It makes doing real good a lot harder. But it also keeps villains from doing the same to us."

After a short pause, Shepard seemed to find an argument. "If that's the case I may need to put Plan 'Attack the Empire' on hold. What about the capes who don't show up to Endbringer fights? They're fair game, right?"

"Not really. The Unwritten Rules apply to everyone."

"Yeah, no. I'll accept the 'greater good' argument only if the other side does too. The people who don't show up to fight don't get amnesty from me."

"But –"

"No. They fight for humanity or they get my sights on their backs."

Bug leaned back, away from the fire in Shepard's eyes. "Uh, alright. I guess we can talk about that later. But I really want to know, why me? I mean, I control bugs. Not really the most useful power out there."

"Ah. Tell, me. What can you do with your power, specifically?"

"I just control any bugs in my range."

"That's not specific. That's a summary. Have you ever seen Princess Bride? It was still a classic almost two hundred years from now."

Bug nodded.

"Remember that quote from Westley? 'If only we had a wheelbarrow, that would be something'? Anything, even if you think it is insignificant, can be potentially very useful."

Bug nodded, still skeptical. "I guess. My range is about two blocks right now."

"Right now?"

"Yeah. It fluctuates depending on the situation, but it's been growing slowly over time."

"Maybe it's like a muscle? The more you use it the better it gets."

"Maybe. I can control any simple minded organisms in my range, from earthworms and beetles to crabs and lobsters. And I don't have a limit on number. I'm only limited by volume."

Shepard's eyebrows rose as she contemplated this. "Impressive."

"I can also tell where all of my bugs are at any time."

" _All_ of them? Do you mean as a sort of general sense, or specifically and individually?"

"Uh, individually."

"And do you do this controlling them too?"

"Yeah. I can tell each of them to do a different thing at the same time."

Shepard mumbled something that sounded like "tactical nightmare" and waved her hand for Bug to continue. When no more information was forthcoming, Shepard voiced a question.

"How do you know where all of your bugs are? Is it just a general sense, or can you see and hear through them?"

"Sort of both. I know where they are like I know where my limbs are at all times, but when I first got powers the sensory input was too much and I blocked it out."

At this Shepard frowned and gave Bug a stern look of disappointment. "Do you realize how useful that could be? You could literally be the fly on _every_ wall. You could be everyone's security nightmare! But really, do you not realize how amazing your power is? A Blaster power – Blaster, right? – can be replaced by a marine with a gun, but yours? That's trillions of credits' worth of surveillance drones that you can supplant with garden variety insects."

Bug seemed a bit at a loss for what to say to this. She had thought she was being creative with her creation of her costume and armor, but what Shepard was suggesting shed a whole new light on her abilities. Rather than being an underwhelming combat cape she had the potential to be a real asset on any team.

When she turned her attention back to Shepard she met her gaze with new found confidence. The soldier spoke again. "Honestly your power creeps me out and sends the civilian in me running, but you have the potential to be great. I know you said you would back during the meeting but before we go any further with plans I want to make sure you have thought this out. Once we start this and make our first move, this will be all about momentum. If we slow down we will end up on the defensive with unknown capes after us. So I need to know. Are you ready to start hunting villains and stick with this until the end, come life or come death?"

There was new conviction in Bug's voice as she returned Shepard's challenge. She pulled her mask down and around her neck and held out a hand. "I'm Taylor. And I'm in."

* * *

 **A/N:There we go! The team has begun. They'll be picking up a couple more people later on, but Shepard and Taylor will remain the core of the team. Hopefully my hand will heal up enough that I can write more soon. See y'all later!**

 **TL:DR: Undersiders are stood up, Taylor gets some confidence, and Shepard puts the kibosh on the Unwritten Rules. People gon' die.**


End file.
